Kings of the World

The wish is always as it should be, you get what you want. Things, they never go this way. Sometimes you’ll see others, they have everything you want and more, and they could be anyone. Men selling cigarettes in the street, laughing, sharing their lives with their coworkers, is who they could be. People building, renovating your condominium lobby, with not enough to eat and barely enough money to get home, telling lives, smiling at what they are, also. They could even be you. It should really get you going. It should really make you feel better with what you have, but it never does.

You should feel lucky, is what they say to you every time you complain or cry about your wants. There are people, they follow up shortly, that are jealous of where you are in life.

Tell me about it.

In the plaster and fake wood that is the Tuscanny lobby, there are men with towels on their heads, white face or wiping towels, lampins, wrapped around their forehead, covering their hair. These towels, they’re shades of grey and pearl white from saw dust, ash, and cement. They’re monuments to their lives, tributes to the work they have done. These towels, they’re crowns to their kingdom.

Kings of the world.

As a child, the nannies, the ones your parents hired to take care of you through the first four or five years of your life, they would put these lampins on your back themselves, robe you, appoint you. Those capes, those robes, they collected your sweat, your cries. They collected your excess while you would run around, and give the nannies orders to fetch your toys, or get you water. You would tell them to dress you, put on your socks for you, kneel down. And these people, they gave you your cape, your robe. They handed you your kingdom.

Those capes, when they’re used, they have no shade. They’re white as when you wore it, but wet with your sweat or soaked in your tears.

I have no lampins now, my towels are big and coloured. Bed sheet wide, heavy and will not hold in place.

Now I have neither a crown or a cape.